


Cleanup Crude

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eren's Immediate Response to Everything is To Make a Churchill Speech, INDEFINITE HIATUS, Land Reclamation Efforts, Levi Finds This Hilarious, Life Outside The Walls, M/M, Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:24:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They claimed to have won the war, but Levi knew that was bullshit. There was nothing satisfying, or even comforting, about what had happened after Trost. </p><p>So they were killing the titans more easily than they ever had before. So they'd pushed the titans out of Wall Maria. So they were finally pushing the titans back, reclaiming what was theirs by right.</p><p>None of that changed what Levi knew, and what Levi knew changed everything. He couldn't fight, not like this, and he couldn't retire, not like this.</p><p>So he cleaned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so: I wrote a thing. 
> 
> A thing in which Eren's titan shifting powers were not discovered by the larger community during the Battle of Trost and everything is different as a result.
> 
> A thing in which Eren's speech in the beginning of SnK is not an isolated incident, but a symptom of a terrible propensity to getting ostentious verbal diarrhea whenever he's nervous and needs to reestablish his sense of purpose. 
> 
> A thing in which Levi's awareness of- spoilers! This is a spoiler from the manga! That's in the tags, why are you reading this- the fact that titans were once humans hinders his ability to function in the field to a point that that once he stops being necessary for the vanguard's advancement, he stops fighting altogether.

He still took work inside the walls sometimes, just for the hell of it.

It was amazing what people would pay a veteran to yell at their children about keeping their rooms clean. It was the best kind of nostalgic self-indulgence that a man like him could get from a single afternoon- the kind that was not only free, but profitable.

Work inside the walls was a well-paid catharsis, reminding him that teenagers outside of the Survey Corps were still the same undisciplined shit-for-brains slobs he remembered them being.

For some reason, he found that strangely comforting.

If he had ever felt the need to explain it, he probably would’ve said that he needed reassurance that the world hadn’t changed much, after everything.

But he didn’t feel the need to explain it, and that was certainly for the same reason that the work he did inside the walls was the exception, rather than the rule.

He hadn’t lost so many good soldiers, hadn’t spent so long fighting back the line that caged humanity in, so he could rot inside the walls for the rest of his life.

Nostalgia was a thing a best enjoyed in moderation.

Levi had bigger craps to take.

But scaring the shit out of spoiled Wall Sina brats could be fun, once in a while, when he happened to be heading to the capital anyway. Being a well-known face on the front lines when they had won- insofar as they had really won, like they could call what had happened _winning_ \- the war against the titans meant that nobody ever talked back to him anymore.

He was a Big Damn Hero now, medals hung, ballads sung, capitals required. It was like the entire population of mankind had suddenly forgotten all the failed missions, all the gruesome deaths, and every single body they hadn’t been able to bring back to the mother who had made it.

People had always been scared of him, but there was a camaraderie in war that emboldened because it was hard to justify being too afraid to speak up to your superior officer when you knew that you’d be fighting something much scarier alongside him.

There was a certain macabre comfort in knowing that you’d probably die too soon for an inadvisable comment or an embarrassing mistake to matter.

Now they’d won, and that unspoken understanding was gone. The people who’d survived with him had either retired or been assigned their own units, had gone on to keep pushing back the line until it disappeared into the horizon. But he couldn’t retire, not as he was, not amidst a people who lived and breathed to misunderstand him and what he’d done, and he couldn’t go on as he had before, not knowing what he knew now.

Not knowing that nothing had changed, after all.

So he took the third option, the middle line: cleanup.

This surprised people who had never known him quite a bit, and people who had known him even slightly too little to say something or simply not at all.

But cleanup was the middle ground in more than one way- it was halfway between the warfront and the wall, yeah, but it was also halfway between the easy companionship of mutual danger and the entitlement of hero worship.

Everyone knew his name but no one ever called it. No one ever challenged his authority or commented on his compulsions. He told them to do something and they did it. He yelled at them for fucking up and they took it. He asked them if their mothers had mistaken particularly bad constipation for labour pains when they’d given birth to them and they answered _“Yes, sir, of course, sir, my mother should be ashamed for letting me slip out without making it to a toilet first, sir, I apologize for her mistake, sir.”_

It was boring.

It was boring and it was lonely.

Levi didn’t consider himself an especially social person, but there was a hell of a difference between being left alone in a crowded room and having that room go quiet when he entered it.

Isolation was a much heavier burden to bear when it was crowded in on him by the presence of company.

He missed having obnoxious, overbearing squadmates.  He missed arguing with people. He missed being frustrated when they wouldn’t leave him alone. He missed feeling angry. He missed feeling resigned. He even missed feeling afraid.

He was just so tired of feeling bored, tired of being left alone with himself.

He really was shitty company, and without anybody to distract him from himself, he was only getting worse.

Today was a bad day. Every day inside the walls was a bad day, but today was a particularly bad day.

He just wanted to leave this fucking place.

“-and I think you’ll find that these recruits are more than capable of getting the job done-”

They were going to be cleaning, not killing titans. It wasn’t like they were going to clean themselves to death. They’d get the job done whether or not this idiot thought them capable- he wouldn’t be letting them sleep until they did.

“-maneuver gear scores were _truly_ exceptional-”

Because they’d clearly be using it extensively hundreds of kilometres behind the vanguard. Scouting out and cleaning buildings that could be repaired and used as housing for the reclamation effort was a highly dangerous business. The threat was real.

Maybe one of them would slip and fall down the fucking stairs. These were the things that kept him awake at night.

He wanted to tell his escort to shut up, but he’d already forgotten- never learned- the man’s name and he was talking so quickly and inexhaustibly that he’d be difficult to interrupt.

He glared at him instead.

He was a woman.

He had no idea when they’d switched, or even if he just hadn’t been paying enough attention from the start.

“-have not seen combat, but rest assured-”

 _Fucking fascinating_. He tried to remember where he was.

Somewhere in Wall Rose, he thought. At one point, he’d cared about these things. He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped.

There was someone else in the hallway, walking in the opposite direction. He looked up in time to glimpse oily hair. Ruddy skin, peppered with pubescent strife. Young. They were always young.

He needed to wash his hands.

It was a narrower space than he’d thought it was, and the kid bumped into him as he passed. He heard a mumbled apology, dimly. The skin above his left elbow felt greasy through his sleeve.

He needed to wash his shirt.

His escort touched his shoulder lightly to get his attention, still talking.

He twitched away from her hand, still ignoring her. He could feel the sweat from her fingertips lingering on his shirt.

He needed to take a shower.

The sour, musky smell of the barracks was pervasive, even through the sharply medicinal scent of whatever it was they’d used to clean- _they call this cleaning_ \- it before his arrival.

Bothering to look took effort.

He was sure he had cared about learning their names, at one point.

After drilling three- _four, this one’s the fifth, isn’t it_ \- squads of twelve to fifteen teenaged shitheads who didn’t know how to do anything but keep their mouths shut until they could operate independently as a team, he’d just stopped caring about that, too.

These ones looked exactly the same as the last ones: young, fit, and either scared or humbled. Sometimes both.

He paused halfway through his languid eyeballing.

“The hell are you staring at?” he asked. It wasn’t really a question.

The kid was grinning, and to be honest, he looked a little crazy. Something about the eyes.

“ _Jaeger_ , eyes front,” his escort snapped. He was a little disappointed the kid hadn’t had the chance to answer.

He’d looked _excited_ , like getting his ass kicked for doing a shitty job was something to look forward to.

Levi had thought he’d forgotten how to feel surprised.

The kid- _Jaeger, was it_ \- snuck a glance at him again, and grinned when he made eye contact.

“ _Jaeger, eyes fucking front!”_

Somebody down the line started snickering, and Levi watched Jaeger’s fist fall halfway out of salute position as he scowled at them.

“ _Jaeger!_ I’m this close to putting you out there to run laps around the compound with Braus, you goddamn embarrassment _-_ ”

His fist jerked back up, stiffly.

A girl down the line- _Braus? Must be_ \- protested that she’d already done her laps this morning, why was she being singled out now?

“- _you really think I don’t see that lump under your jacket, Braus, are you calling your superior officer an idiot? Kirschtein, quit your laughing or you’ll be joining them, you’re a disgrace-”_

Levi had a good feeling about this group.

They seemed like a first-class bunch of morons.

***

Shipping out was always an ordeal.

It had gotten better in the last three years, but the bullshit that had gone down in Wall Maria, and later, in Trost- _and then everything went to hell, they made it that far and then they stopped, it stopped and it suddenly started being easy, why, why then, why at Trost, why, why, **why**_ \- meant that the road was still undergoing restoration efforts. Five years of neglect had taken their toll on the land, and the reclamation of farmland had been given priority status. Understandably.

They were heroes more for the fact that families could expect to have food on their tables come winter this year than for pushing the titans back far beyond the walls.

Few people had yet to venture beyond them into the reclamation zones. Most of those hunting and farming outside the walls were retired soldiers, not civilians.

And what that meant was that the road from Trost to Shiganshina was rough.

His recruits were acting up again; he could hear them bickering in the wagon behind him. He peered over his shoulder curiously, slowing his horse until the pair pulling the cart began to creep past.

“Don’t go assuming everybody else is a suicidal moron like _you_ ,” one of them was sniping, “no matter how much you talk it up, there’s nothing to do on the vanguard but die.”

He could see sun-bleached hair, lighter on top and darker where it had been shaved underneath. _Kirschtein_ , he thought. He was distinctive, memorable for his mouthiness, but fairly popular amongst his teammates.

His opponent was, as always, one Eren Jaeger.

 _There’s one name I’m not likely to forget_ , Levi mused.

After the introduction, Jaeger had aggressively introduced himself, argued with his sister- _is she really his sister? They look nothing alike. Ackerman, I believe it was, so the names are different, too_ \- argued with his teammate- started by one “God, you’re such a fucking embarrassment, Eren,” courtesy of the notable Jean Kirschtein, _that’s right, it was Jean, wasn’t it_ \- and the two of them had spilt leather oil all over the barracks floor in the ensuing scuffle.

If he had to guess, he didn’t think they actually hated, or even disliked, each other.

They were just teenaged idiots.

Most of them were eighteen or almost eighteen, which was exactly old enough for them to feel like they knew everything while being way too goddamn young to know anything at all.

He listened as Jaeger got started, slowing until the cart began to pull past him.

“The titans aren’t even a threat- we’re going to wipe them off the face of the planet,” Eren insisted. His tone had taken on a carrying sound, like he was making a speech. “ _I’m_ going to wipe them out. There’s so much out there to see, and you’re content with just tagging along behind the lines until they clear it out for you? Never being the first to see something human eyes haven’t seen in over a hundred years? You’re really happy to follow the front lines like sheep, grazing on what grass they leave untrampled?”

Levi just looked, long and hard, at the back of his head.

The recruits had started to notice him.

Kirschtein’s protest of “Eren, you said almost the exact same thing when I said I wanted to go into Military Police, what do you want… from… me…” died off as they made eye contact.

Levi brought his hands together in a very slow, condescending show of applause as Eren started to notice his teammate’s consternation.

He looked over his shoulder, met Levi’s eyes, and _yelped_.

It was all he could do not to laugh.

“Fucking beautiful,” Levi murmured dryly. “If I’d known you could spew shit out of your mouth _and_ your ass, I would’ve wrapped your head in a diaper before we left, Jaeger.”

He watched the colour rise in Eren’s face as he stammered out an objection.

Levi tilted his head towards him slowly, fixing him with an almost disinterested stare.

Eren was helpfully silent for the rest of the day.

Come evening, though, after they’d settled into a local farmhouse- _still abandoned. I guess superstitions will hold them off until they run out of other options_ \- Levi caught him gearing up make another pointlessly inspirational speech over dinner.

“What, you think you’re fighting a war, Jaeger? I’m sure the rats that have infested these places will take off running at the sound of your flatulent mouth,” he mocked.

Eren didn’t stutter this time, apparently better prepared than he had been earlier.

Instead, he just grinned.

He really did look a bit crazy, this kid.

 _Something about the eyes_ , Levi thought. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some mysterious backstory and Eren's really goddamn weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like I am updating this. Y'know, at least once.

The next morning was interesting, if watching seven teenagers totter around groggily at the crack of dawn could be called interesting.

As it turned out, only two of them were morning people in the truest sense of the word, and both of those were tiny, fragile-looking blondes.

Well, one of the blondes was taller than him.

 _Arlert,_ he dredged up. Arlert and Lenz.

Braus, it seemed, was the third to come to full consciousness, but only when faced with the smell of food. Her appetite was fascinating. He could almost respect that kind of voracity, because she was so thorough about the whole goddamn eating thing that she didn’t even leave crumbs.

He liked that.

He had almost counted Ackerman- _Mikasa, I believe, and she’s supposed to be Jaeger’s sister_ \- among the first two, but then he’d noticed the slow precision of her movements and realized that she only _looked_ fully awake. It was quite a skill, that kind of poise.

Springer was next, grumbling as he slumped over his bowl, then Kirschtein, whose long legs and lanky frame had apparently caused him some discomfort, if his wincing was anything to go by- _serves him right for taking up so much space_ , Levi thought, more amused than vindictive.

Jaeger was actually one of the first to the table- _if anyone could call this a table. Was probably a work bench or a slaughtering block at one point. Disgusting_ \- but even his considerable willpower had failed to earn him a spot in the top three, because he’d fallen asleep sitting up, and if he thought that Levi wouldn’t notice Arlert and Ackerman surreptitiously keeping him upright, he had something else coming to him.

When he started snoring, Arlert had the decency to look embarrassed.

Jaeger’s sister just shrugged and let him fall, apparently failing to see the point in keeping up the game any longer.

Jaeger woke when his jaw hit the table, spluttering in pain.

He’d been drooling.

_Repulsive._

“You’re a shitstain of the highest caliber to be drooling on my table, Jaeger,” Levi told him, and watched his face darken with mortification.

He stuttered out a _“No, sir, uh-”_ and Levi snorted, eying his small collection of teenagers where they were squatting, some on log sections, one- _Kirschtein_ , he reminded himself- on a tottering wooden stool, and another- _Braus_ \- on the floor itself.

Something had been bothering him since yesterday.

“Why are there so few of you?” he asked pointedly. “Most training groups have at least fifteen kids in them. Half your class drop out?”

The entire group slowed at his question. There was a drawn weariness to their expressions.

Arlert shot him a sad, dark little smile. “Something like that, sir.”

Jaeger’s eyes were downcast. He’d bitten deep into his lower lip when he’d fallen on the table, but he didn’t seem to have noticed, and blood was welling at the corner of his mouth.

“Trost,” he interrupted, “We were at the Trost when it happened.”

Levi felt his eyes widen in fractional acknowledgement. “Your instructor told me you’d never fought.”

Arlert shared a meaningful glance with Ackerman and coughed lightly into his fist, bowl discarded neatly on the table in front of him. There was almost a smile playing on his lips. It was hard to tell in the meagre light filtering through the warped slats of the barn wall.

“ _‘I know you are accustomed to training recruits who have not seen combat, but rest assured, our one-hundred-and-fourth trainee squad is experienced, capable, and well-disciplined, despite its small size_ ’,” he quoted, and Levi stared at him in muted interest.

“I wasn’t even in the room when she unloaded that crap on me,” he muttered. “And well-disciplined? Don’t give that me that shit, Christ.”

Arlert was definitely smiling now. It was small, but it was there. “I helped our chief re-instructor write her speech, sir,” he supplied helpfully. He withdrew into himself self-consciously when Levi glowered at him, but there was a resilience in his eyes that was interesting. “It would have been worse if I hadn’t, honestly,” he pointed out.

Levi sighed. “So you were at Trost. Good. You don’t need to ask me stupid questions about titans, then.” He paused. “What did they have you doing between then and now if they didn’t put you on the lines?” He’d thought that all the kids with any experience had been sent.

Something unexpectedly steely surfaced in Jaeger’s expression, and shared glances darted between Kirschtein, Springer, and Lenz. Braus appeared to be ignoring them, but her nervous glances in Eren’s direction made Levi suspect otherwise. Ackerman’s elbow jabbed into Jaeger’s ribs when he went to speak. Comparatively, Arlert’s poker face was a thing to behold.

“We were on cleanup for Trost, sir,” Arlert answered. “And then we helped with the reclamation of Shiganshina.”

There was something meaningful in his tone that Levi couldn’t quite decipher. He narrowed his eyes, mulling it over. “Odd thing for them to put in the hands of trainees,” he murmured suspiciously.

Ackerman’s soft voice was so often left unheard amongst her companions’ that it was immediately and inescapably audible- even still husky with sleep, her words were clear, concise, and carrying. “We’re from Shiganshina,” she said. Her inflection was simple, flat and toneless, like she was describing a dump she’d taken earlier that morning.

“Eren, Mikasa and I, she means,” Arlert amended, less unemotionally.

Jaeger was uncharacteristically silent.

The rest of the group was shifting and mumbling amongst themselves uncomfortably.

“Armin, Eren, and Mikasa’s familiarity with the area made them an asset during reclamation,” the other blonde- _Lenz_ \- piped up. A sweet, but surprisingly strong, voice, he noted, but her words sounded practiced. He didn’t think he’d ever really heard her speak before, either. She was small, quiet, easy to miss. He looked at her curiously and she shrunk back into herself, that brief, quiet forcefulness disappearing.

Kirschtein muttered corroboration- _“Krista’s right- after Trost, they put off our graduation and stuck us behind the front lines on the road to Shiganshina,”_ and the _thanks to these three_ was implicit- and Springer nodded furiously along with him while Braus growled something inarticulate that was presumably some sort of assent through a mouthful of Springer’s food.

Their rapport dissolved as Springer realized what Braus was eating, and the table returned to chaos. Only Arlert was still watching him, sweet-faced but shrewd. He’d have to keep an eye on that one.

Levi went to rub a hand over his face, looked at the state of his surroundings, and thought better of it. It was becoming too much effort to care about some of his squad hailing from Shiganshina. They were just another bunch of stupid kids. He was starting to miss being too terrifying to talk to. This was exhausting. _Well-disciplined, my ass_.

He needed a shower.

***

He would have said that the Shiganshina trio grew quiet as they approached the wall, but the fact of the matter was that Jaeger was the only one of them mouthy enough to be noticeably different.

So Jaeger grew quiet as they approached the wall, Arlert grew quieter, and Ackerman continued being unhelpfully silent with renewed vigor.

He pulled his horse around to their side of the cart. “You need to make any stops before we pass?”

He wasn’t really sure why he was asking. Probably just in case one of them got too emotional and puked in the wagon, or something. Arlert seemed like he could be the type.

Arlert shook his head, expression grim.

“We’ve already gotten everything we can from Shiganshina,” he said softly, “there’s nothing left for us there.”

Levi eyed him speculatively. “You sure you’re not going to get homesick past that wall?”

It was Jaeger who answered, a quiet fire- _that look_ \- in his eyes. “The hundred-and-fourth is our home now, sir.”

Levi snorted, caught off-guard.

“Touching,” he murmured, eying him. “Just don’t come running to me in the middle of the night, I’m not your goddamn mother.” He paused, mock-thoughtful. “You’re not a bedwetter, are you, Jaeger?”

The cart erupted into laughter as Eren spluttered in denial.

He almost didn’t catch the kid’s low, strangely reverent addition of _“I know you’re not my mother.”_

Levi had no idea what to say to that, so he pretended not to have heard.

 _Fucking weirdo_.

***

The trip through Shiganshina was surprisingly uneventful, and for that, he was grateful.

He hated the ruins. Hated looking at them. Hated knowing that he didn’t know.

The way the buildings in this district had been smashed, but only in some places- _I’ve never seen a titan take apart a wall like that, and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of titans_ \- and left untouched in others, well, it whispered maddeningly, tantalizingly, about secrets he’d discovered and secrets he’d been denied.

No matter where he tried to point his eyes, left unchecked for a moment, he found them wandering towards where he knew they’d found the basement.

When they’d arrived, it had already been uncovered and unlocked, left open but not bare, an unasked for gift to those who’d followed so closely behind its discoverers that the dust in the air had settled in their hair and cloaks, muddying the shine of their boots like an afterthought.

He glanced away again, towards the cart.

It was silent. He wasn’t surprised. The air was oppressive, the scenery sinister.

They’d never bothered to clean up Shiganshina. He wasn’t certain they ever would.

Ackerman was staring forward, eyes locked on a distant and unknowable point.

Jaeger had his fists balled in his lap and was staring at them.

Arlert was watching him surreptitiously.

When he made eye contact, the boy kept it for longer than he’d expected, longer than was strictly appropriate, before dropping his gaze.

Levi scrutinized him for a few more moments before his eyes began to wander again.

Well, he didn’t look like he was going to throw up, and that was the important thing.

***

Once they were outside the wall, the relief was not so much palpable as it was _audible_ \- it was in perfect tandem that his crew drew shuddering breaths of relief, some of them gasping as though they’d just emerged from the pungent haze of someone’s particularly foul gas.

Levi made a point of mentioning that.

A clearly mortified Braus so quickly found herself the subject of such hypothetical blame that he also made a mental note not to bunk in a room near to hers.

***

Reclamation outside of the walls had hit a curious point.

By curious, he meant incredibly inconvenient for reclamation crews hoping to push further into the land cleared of and shielded from titans by the formidable presence of the vanguard.

Enough land had been successfully reclaimed- insofar as empty, moderately liveable housing on questionably arable land could really be considered reclaimed- that he had heard talk of building a crewing outpost a day’s ride from the hole that had once been the Shiganshina gate.

Levi favoured the idea. It was practical.

Unfortunately, it had not yet been put into _practice_ , and that meant that rather than riding towards the brief prospect of warm beds, fresh supplies, and clean water before them, his crew was riding towards three more nights spent huddled under quickshod roofs that kept out rain over walls that let in drafts, or worse, a night or two pressed into the trunks of trees, ears straining for the distant crack of thunder.

They were lucky in their unluckiness.

Only one night of the three came with a roof overhead, and that was the only night that rained.

In the monotony of travel and periodic encampment, however, Levi discovered a great many facts about Eren Jaeger, most of them unasked for, some of them unsaid.

One of the latter was this: Eren had the attention span of a child.

Faced with something that arrested his interest, he was rapturously intense.

When it was removed, his mind wandered and his body began to dance in its seat, restlessness creeping from his drumming fingers to his stretching elbows to his rolling shoulders to his wandering eyes.

And with that, Levi discovered another untold factoid about the kid.

He _stared_.

It wasn’t an active, purposeful stare, like Levi had become accustomed to meeting when he looked at him- it was an absentminded, clearly unintentional stare, like he was an infant whose unattended eyes turned unconsciously towards and moved with the flashing rotation of a brightly-coloured bauble in a woman’s hair.

He’d caught Jaeger staring at him over the campfire the first night, head tilted attentively towards Arlert but eyes trained in Levi’s direction.

A sharp warning had stirred him from his reverie, but it had not stopped him- Levi had looked away, attending to something trivial, ultimately unmemorable, and when he’d looked back, the kid had been doing it again.

Suddenly aware of the weight of those strangely intent eyes on his back, he found himself unable to ignore it the following day.

And the day after.

By the third day, he’d begun to weave around the cart experimentally, amused and disconcerted.

He discovered that Jaeger could, in fact, still stare at him if he rode directly behind him.

Over the course of an hour, perhaps less, his body would begin to turn, body shifting on the bench, knees crowding his companions into one another, until he was facing forwards or backwards rather than inward, and his face would begin to tilt outwards, inexorably, until his unchecked eyes found what they were looking for.

It was kind of funny.

It was also fucking weird, and really goddamn unsettling.

It was with a rare impatience that Levi watched their target grow on the horizon. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home, sweet home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been eight months since I last updated this. I didn't realize anybody wanted it updated, honestly.

He couldn’t decide if he was misremembering how bad it had been the previous times, if the pickings were just slimmer this far out from the wall, or if the scouts’ standards for what constituted salvageable housing were just getting lower.

In any case, it didn’t really matter. The place was a fucking dump, and that was the truth of it.

It would take a lot of work before it became anything but a sagging, leaky roof sheltering the rotted floor of a dangerous-looking upstairs and an oppressively filthy ground floor, but the walls were stone, and they were standing solidly, which meant they had more promise to them than just the immediate offer of a few minutes here and there of escape from Jaeger’s creepy staring.

It was still funny, in a way, but it set him on edge.

He couldn’t quite figure out why the kid’s wandering eyes always returned to him.

 _Probably the reputation,_ he thought, and knew it was the most plausible answer.

But still.

There was just something about those eyes that bothered him.

The supply squad that had preceded them had left their allotted stock of lumber leaning up against the side of the house. It was something they had a bad habit of doing, despite receiving a variety of warnings and outright threats from crew leaders in the past.

He was amongst them. Rain-soaked wood had slowed his squads down before.

This time, though, they’d had the decency to wrap it in oilcloth, so he supposed he couldn’t really complain.

The barrels of tar and linseed oil nestled beside their saws and hammers was a nice touch, too. He was glad someone had finally listened to his complaints about the importance of weatherproofing.

They were still a long way from glass windows, but he’d take what he could get.

The fact that the decorative-looking well in the yard still drew water, for example.

He took that with a groan of relief.

***

Once they’d stripped the worst of the filth from the ground floor’s main interior, the deceptively rustic inside walls and support beams turned out to be sealed with a sophisticated sort of resin he wasn’t familiar with.

Not only were they still standing with little to no sign of real damage, the varnish hadn’t even yellowed.

When they stripped the bits of moldering carpet and years of drifting leaves from the floor, the wood beneath was similarly untouched.

He was bemused.

It was a strange house.

The layout was peculiar- the ground floor was primarily dedicated to one large room, backed by a smaller room with a long hole in the middle of it, like a window, and two smaller rooms behind that. In a hallway to the far right, and in one of the smaller rooms at the back, they’d found stairs leading up to the ruined upper floor.

He told himself not to think too much about something that mattered so little, but the cleaner the ground became beneath his feet, the more its surreal perfectness troubled him.

As the light started to wane on their first day of scouring the main room, he caught Arlert crouching and staring at the ground by the door.

“Eren,” he was whispering, snapping the thumb and forefinger of his right hand against each other in what Levi could only assume was an attempt to get the kid’s attention. He didn’t look to see where it was currently directed. They all already knew. “Eren, look at this.” His eyes glanced surreptitiously towards Levi and stuck when he caught Levi looking back.

“Something you want to share, Arlert?”

He surprised- and, if he was being honest with himself, a little pleased- to find he had the balls to straighten up and turn towards him properly instead of shrinking away. “It’s not wood, sir,” he said after a moment of consideration.

The room quieted to a mumble as their motley arrangement of scrubbers and sweepers and trash collectors ground to an attentive halt.

He quirked an eyebrow.

Arlert looked down at the floor again, and then back up at him. “The floor, the walls- they’re not wood. This is stone that’s made to look like wood.”

He raised both eyebrows, set down his broom, and stalked towards him, casting an incredulous glance down.

“I’ll be damned,” he mumbled, because against all odds, he was right.

A chip had broken off of one of the planks beside the door, and what was underneath that chip wasn’t a splintering and rotted mess of unprotected wood left to the elements- it was something grey, only slightly discoloured by what looked to be water damage.

He squatted and ran a finger along it curiously.

It felt like rough-hewn stone. It didn’t look like any stone he’d ever seen.

“What is this?” he muttered, half to himself. Beside him, Armin shifted.

“I think it’s concrete,” he said abruptly, answering Levi’s questioning look with, “it’s something they used to build with before the titans came. It’s like mortar without stone.” His expression was distant, thoughtful. “I remember reading about it.”

Levi considered him with narrow interest. “You know any book you could read about that in is considered contraband, right, kid?” he asked casually, straightening from the floor with a grunt.

When he received no response- _disappointing. Shouldn’t’ve expected too much_ \- he made to walk away.

“The tea leaves you have hidden in the supply wagon are considered an interior-only luxury item,” Arlert said very softly. Levi paused. “Outside the walls, they’re considered contraband, too.”

 _Maybe not,_ he mused. “I’m aware,” he admitted. “Wine, tobacco, tea- sugar and salt, too, unless they’re being used for preservative purposes, and then they’re just as likely to tell you to build a smokehouse instead. Something about- what did he say? ‘The presence of non-essential goods in a low-resource environment fosters jealousy, dissent, and distraction’.” He hummed contemplatively, eying Springer where he stood sweeping idly at the same spot in an attempt to look like he wasn’t listening. “Better for none of us out here to have anything to make our lives easier than for a few of them in there to do without so all of us can, eh?”

 He picked up his broom from where he’d left it against the wall and looked around at them.

“For the record, he was right. I have no intentions of sharing,” he said drily. There was a smattering of suppressed laughter. “Any questions?”

Even as the rest of the room stirred back into reluctant life, Arlert was still frowning. Levi watched him carefully as he made as though to say something.

He never had the chance to.

“This is an alehouse,” Braus said abruptly from behind the strange half-wall at the back of the room.

Levi blinked. “What?” From the corner of his eye, he saw comprehension dawn on Springer and Kirschtein’s faces and felt a twinge of annoyance at his own inability to understand what she was babbling about.

“She’s right,” Kirschtein murmured, looking around with a bemused expression. “It might be an inn, actually, if there are bedrooms upstairs.” When Levi continued to stare at him, he gestured impatiently at the long hole Braus was staring at them through and then again at the broad expanse of the main room. “This isn’t a house. Where Sasha’s standing, that’s the bar counter,” he explained, “and behind her, that was probably the kitchen. The other one might be some sort of storeroom, or a place for the workers to rest.”

Halfway through the explanation, he made the connection. He only half-listened to the rest. “Drunks. That’s why the floor is made of stone instead of wood. It’s easier to clean- harder to damage,” he marveled.

Braus made an affirmative noise as Kirschtein started to talk again. “And this,” he continued, indicating the area they stood in, “is the barroom. I think this pile of shit Jaeger and I have been hauling bits out of all day might’ve been tables at one point.”

The charm of their discovery was short-lived in his mind. Something sinister was clicking into place behind it. He didn’t realize Jaeger had said something until his sister prompted him to slow down and repeat himself.

“I was right,” Jaeger was saying triumphantly, eyes brilliant and hands filthy, “there’s something underneath all this wood. They’re blocking the stairs to the basement!”

“What the hell is it with you and basements, Eren,” Kirschtein groused, and Levi cut off their bickering with a sharp rap of his broom handle against the wall.

“What’s this about a basement?” he demanded, crossing the room with a sense of uneasy urgency. He interrupted Jaeger’s excited blathering as soon as his eyes made sense of what he was looking at. “Leave this alone until I tell you to unblock it. That’s an order.”

When he turned, he glimpsed a confused-looking Lenz murmuring something to a Springer who was starting to look equally as bewildered. They jumped when they caught him looking.

“Um,” Lenz started in her sweet, high voice, “it’s just- you said the floor is stone because it was easier to take care of, so I was wondering why there seems to have been carpet?”

Springer mumbled support- _“yeah, it would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”_ \- and Levi looked down again, stomach sinking.

“It wasn’t carpet,” he muttered bitterly. The room went quieter and quieter until only Jaeger was still shuffling and mumbling beside the blocked stairs to the basement, and then, when Ackerman nudged him with her elbow to get his attention, it was silent.

He knew what he was looking at, now. It was a bittersweet feeling.

The knowing was the reason he usually made a point of not looking too closely.

“It wasn’t carpet,” he repeated quietly. “They were mats. And blankets.” He swallowed the sour taste lingering on the back of his tongue as his eyes drift up to the rotted wood of the ceiling and the hole in the roof he knew lay above it. “People were hiding in here.” He looked back to Jaeger and Kirschtein’s pile of moldering wood and the basement entrance they’d been piled over. “Which of you is the least likely to puke if you see a body?”

Jaeger’s hand shot up with a morbidly hilarious immediacy. In the corner, Ackerman noticed, and belatedly lifted her own with an equally disturbing look of indifference.

Kirschtein’s hand started to rise, wavered, and then fell. Braus shook her head when he looked at her. Springer wouldn’t meet his eye. Arlert would, but he looked a bit green. Lenz’s untroubled expression and clear-eyed detachment was a surprise, but he’d never had any intention of choosing her in the first place.

He looked between Ackerman and Jaeger and resigned himself.

It was already approaching evening, and he needed the rotted wooden stairs stabilized so someone could lay oilcloth over the worst of the holes in the upstairs floor and spare them all another night sleeping outdoors. She and Springer were the only two who’d looked like they had any idea what they were doing when handed a hammer. He couldn’t afford to have either of them too shaken up to work.

All the same, he knew none of them would be able to sleep if he left them wondering what was down there.

Jaeger had held that same hammer like he saw it as nothing but a weapon.

“Congratulations, Jaeger,” he sighed. “Looks like you’ll get to see that basement after all.”

The kid’s grin was entirely too delighted for someone who’d just been told he’d most likely be spending the rest of his evening dragging what was left of ancient corpses out of a sealed, stagnant hole in the ground.

_Fucking weirdo._

***

It was simultaneously better and worse than he’d expected.

The stench made his eyes water.

Jaeger was staring forward in what he could only describe as blank shock. White cloth hung loose around his neck.

“Cover your mouth and stay back,” Levi ordered from behind his own mask.

His suspicions had been right.

The reason the basement had been covered was the same reason he was watched so carefully whenever he was in the walls, and related to the reason he made them nervous- someone who’d chosen to be a soldier had a lot to lose if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, but someone who’d been forced to become one did not.

 _I guess now I can tell Hanji it can happen underground, too,_ he mused in a fit of black humour.

There was no mistaking it- if what was left of the centuries-old carnage didn’t speak loudly enough to confirm that, the bulbous-eyed monstrosity stirring slowly into wakefulness inside the edge of the shallow square of muted light filtering down the stairwell certainly did.

It reached for him with a stubby, fat-fingered hand, scrabbling weakly against the dirty floor when he stepped back. The moan it released was low, but not low enough to go unheard by those above.

_Damn it._

He heard Jaeger suck in a sharp breath through his teeth as he broke out of his reverie.

“It can’t move, so calm down,” Levi told him without turning.

He looked into the muddied brown iris of its visible eye and felt his lip curl in disgust, but he honestly wasn’t sure it was directed towards the titan or himself.

It was difficult to believe that only a few years before, he would’ve been able to answer that question in a single dismissive breath, without any hesitation.

As he slid one of his blades from its holster and separated that reaching hand from its wrist, he thought about the terror the others must have felt when it had happened.

As he walked primly around its colossal head, he thought about the fear of the people who had piled those tables over the hole and the fear of the people trapped behind them.

He wondered if the poor bastard who’d made it all happen had known it was happening.

If they had felt it happening.

If they been aware.

If they still were, somewhere in there.

And then he brought his hands down in a single clean arc and didn’t wonder anything.

The titan’s body spasmed, relaxed, and began to decay. He watched it for a moment before turning back to the boy by the stairs.

He still hadn’t put his damn kerchief over his mouth. Levi wiped his sword and his hands- _old habits_ \- and stalked towards him. “Which part,” he snapped, yanking the cloth up over Jaeger’s chin roughly, “of ‘cover your goddamn mouth’ did you not understand?”

The response he expected was some mixture of embarrassment and anger, followed by a sullen protest, even an instinctive attempt to strike out the one who was suddenly manhandling him- what he got was Eren staring down at him with startled, questioning eyes.

The absurdity of it snapped what little patience he was relying on. He grabbed the kid by the front of his shirt and hauled him down. “I’m going to give you some advice,” he gritted. “When I tell you to cover your damn mouth, you cover your damn mouth. You know why?”

He didn’t look frightened, and he wasn’t trying to pull away from Levi’s grip on him. The realization was a little disconcerting. Levi released his shirt and shoved him back.

 “It’s not because I’m your superior officer, and it’s sure as hell not because I’m telling you to do it so we can fucking _match_.” Jaeger stumbled before getting his footing and raised a hand to the front of his shirt almost absentmindedly. “This basement has been sealed for hundreds of years. Do you know what you’re breathing in down here?”

He didn’t look like he was sure whether or not he was supposed to answer.

“Do you know what you’re breathing in down here?” Levi repeated again.

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t fucking breathe it in, it’s not that complicated,” he growled. “If you get sick, it’s your own fault, and you’ll still be stripping shingles off the roof with me even if you’re dying.”

He turned back to where the titan had been, irritated. It was a macabre stretch of vaguely human-shaped clear floor in a room otherwise befouled by accumulated dirt, long-dried blood, and a menacing number of shapeless mounds that were probably all time had left of all that was left of the people trapped in the basement with the titan.

He closed his eyes and wondered why he hadn’t taken the offer to just retire and be done with it.

 _Maybe I’ll just move into this one after we’re finishing fixing it,_ he thought morbidly. It wouldn’t be the worst place he had lived.

“I won’t get sick, sir,” Eren said out of nowhere.

He sighed again grimacing at the blackened smears on the floor and walls.

“Just keep your mouth covered and shut up.”

***

“Why do you call me by my last name?”

Ever since he’d taken Jaeger into the basement with him, he hadn’t stopped talking to him like they were suddenly friends.

“I call all of your by your last names,” he answered shortly.

“But why do you call us by our last names?”

He was starting to miss the eerie staring.

“Maybe I like it better that way,” he humoured, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn stain on the wall.

“Nobody else calls us by our last names.”

He clenched his rag in his fist and inhaled deeply, taking a moment to calm himself.

“Why do you care what I call you?” he countered, glancing over at the kid to make sure he wasn’t slacking off.

He wasn’t. He was kneeling on the floor with a bucket of murky water at his side, scrubbing gamely at the worst of the smudges by the steps. For once, he wasn’t staring back.

His scrubbing slowed for a moment before he shrugged, saying, “it feels cold, I guess.”

Levi sighed and turned back to his stain. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘impersonal’,” he muttered, dunking his rag into his own bucket of water before working a corner of it into one of the larger pits in the concrete of the wall. “And it’s supposed to be.”

“Why?”

He considered that he might be fighting a losing battle, both with the wall and the kid.

“Because there’s no point in being personal with people you’ll never see again after a few months,” he said frankly. “After they say this place meets living requirements, they’ll ship us all back to the administrative outpost in Trost, make one of you crew leader, and hand me another batch of idiots. We’re not going to know each other more than six months. Eight, if upstairs is worse than I expected.”

Abruptly, he realized he couldn’t hear Jaeger’s brush moving against the floor anymore.

The kid was staring at him, eyebrows knitted together in consternation.

“I thought Armin said-” he started, and then shook his head, dropping back down to focus on the floor. “I’ll just ask him later.”

Levi stared at him suspiciously for moment before returning to his work.

***

The words ‘I thought Armin said’ turned out to be an omen of things to come.

“What?” he asked, aghast.

Arlert nodded. He looked a little amused.

“You didn’t read the notice, did you?”

Levi never read the notices.

Erwin had always briefed him in person when he’d been in the Corps.

He had developed a lot of habits, not all of them good, but he had never developed the habit of reading notices.

“All housing located more than three hundred kilometres from the closest egress of Wall Maria must be resided in by those responsible for its reclamation for a period of no less than twelve months after being declared habitable by a licensed inspector conducting a thorough and unbiased evaluation of the premises,” Arlert recited effortlessly, hands folded neatly in his lap. He paused for a moment, pale eyes flickering over Levi’s face. “It’s because this building’s too far out to get help to quickly. If something goes wrong because we overlooked it, the whole place could come down.”

Levi leaned his forehead on his fists and bit back a groan. “Bullshit. It’s because they want to make sure we don’t slack off, and the best way to do that is to make sure we’re the ones who have to live with the results of our work.”

Arlert laughed softly.

“That too,” he agreed. Levi could hear him smiling. “In any case, you’re stuck with us for at least a year and a half. Sorry.”

He could see Jaeger beaming unapologetically at him from where he was crouched by the fireplace. Levi grimaced at him.

“What are you fucking grinning at? You’re not sorry at all, are you?” he shot.

“No, sir,” he said without preamble.

Levi sighed and fixed him with an exhausted look.

If he’d looked up at that moment, he would’ve seen Arlert doing the same and learned to feel warier of the circumstances than he did.

But he did not, so he said was,

“You’re a piece of shit, Eren, but at least you’re an honest one,”

which was an indulgence he may have had the foresight not to give if he had.


End file.
